After upgrading to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, I was unpleasantly surprised when I plugged in my camera SD card to try to upload a few new picture I have taken.
I always keep the photos on my SD card as a backup, and formerly iPhoto would scan through the card then pop up and show me the new pictures for import. Now, instead of seeing a progress bar as it scans there is just a similar delay with no progress bar, and the only choice it gives me is to "Import 2054 pictures". There are only something like 5 new pictures I took today that I want to import .
I'm assuming this is the fault of the Mavericks upgrade, and need to figure out how to get the old behavior back. I have read about a "hide previously imported photos" but I don't see that anywhere under preferences (was it moved in this version?). I'm a bit puzzled as to why it occurred around the Mavericks upgrade though, as I'm running iPhoto '11 , version 9.5 (902.7) which is is 3 years old.
Best Answer
For some reason, the update to Mavericks caused iPhoto to forget the location of my iPhoto library, which was on an external drive. I held down the option key while loading iPhoto and confirm that the default library was a newly created library on the local drive and that my external drive library was present but not selected it. When I selected it, I was informed that I had to upgrade it to the most current version. After this was complete, plugging in my SD card resulting in iPhoto recognizing the existing photos as duplicates. Unfortunately, unlike the old version it no longer gives any progress as it reads the card and processes it, but at least the issue is resolved.